Take a Chance on Me by Jane Porter

Savvy stylist Amanda Wright loves Marietta, her hair salon, and her clients, and no client is more dear to her heart than eighty-year-old Bette Justice–even if her years have made her a little fragile. So when Bette asks Amanda to help her convince her determined grandson, Tyler, a successful game designer, that Marietta is the right home for Bette, Amanda can’t say no.

Tyler Justice has a one-track mind–he wants to take care of his beloved grandmother. He can’t understand her resistance to move to Texas and is sure that the young friend she keeps mentioning–Amanda–is taking advantage of his grandmother’s generosity. He reaches Marietta determined to put the salon owner in her place and bring his grandmother home…until smart, kind Amanda starts to tug at his heart in ways he never expected.

But just as Tyler and Amanda start to form a real connection, will a long-buried family secret destroy their chance at love?

I was frankly, bored with this. Bored because I could see the conflict and the eventual resolution coming, unmoved because I couldn’t feel any chemistry between Amanda and Tyler.

Porter posits Marietta as a small but pretty base where happiness is an almost-guarantee (Tule’s publishing numerous Marietta books attest to it), so it was a given that Tyler would in the end, learn to love the place as Amanda and Bette do…there was no other option available here, because apparently Marietta was the answer to problems, so the man—who apparently is the one with the one-track mind—has to do all the compromising, when it became evident that the whole book centred around getting Tyler to see the beauty of the community that was Marietta.

In fact, I didn’t think Tyler was an arse at all, not when his way of wanting to move his grandmother somewhere else had merit which no one else would see. That Amanda pushed her own issues of her past on to Tyler rather unfairly, or that Tyler seemed to be the one always giving in made it hard to read on, especially when Tyler was the only one made to go on the uphill climb to find his own feet when everyone else sang the happy song of Marietta.

‘Take a Chance on Me’ rubbed me the wrong way early in the book and sadly, I never quite got back that sense of traction or the desire to go on.